I live now in a small regional capital in a sparsely populated country on the bottom side of the globe. So getting the gig to podcast Macworld 2009 in San Francisco was like heaven on a memory stick. Everywhere you turned there was that buzz of Mac aficionado innovation, and everyone you ran into – regardless it seems of who they had actually voted for – had a sense of some Obama-inspired renewal about to wash over the country.

So it came as a bit of a shock when we did this interview with Alan November, the name behind November Learning and one of the US’s top educational commentators, and heard instead a very different story. Shot in Moscone West, this chat paints a picture of complacency and lack of vision in American education, and suggests some real concerns about the capacity of the system to make positive and significant change.

This podcast episode is a little different to our usual format. For a start its video rather than straight audio. And instead of one of us Aussies putting the questions to Alan, we have as our guest interviewer Chris Walsh. President of Epoch Learning, Chris was a co-founder of Brightstorm and a founding director at the Google Teaching Academy. Chris tackles some hard issues with Alan in this two-part interview, though they have a lot of fun doing it.

Alan November has his Building Learning Communities Conference coming up in Boston at the end of July, with a cast of high-powered keynotes and a promise that the event will be a ‘jam session’ of stimulating ideas. It sounded so interesting we even let Alan do an escalator promo for it at the end of the interview!

Mike Keppell is the new president of ASCILITE (that’s the Australasian Society for the use of Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education), an organisation with a long and honorable history of promoting improved uses of technology in higher education down under, and whose most recent conference we have done some coverage of in another forum.

Mike is pretty excited about lots of the devices and systems that were gathered together at Macworld, because they promise to make a massive impact on the way we go about our teaching and learning in universities. In particular, increasing mobility and interoperability mean that we will of necessity become much more learner-centric, especially as learners acquire enhanced capacities to collect content on the fly, and indeed to generate their own content.

In this podcast Mike speaks to an equally excited Allan Carrington, for whom, of course, the question of how we disseminate and implement the visionary ideas inspired by Macworld is never too far away.

Allan Ellis, from Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, likes the sense of innovation that pervades IDG Macworld, and he talks in this interview about the ways in which education needs to change in response to some of the technological developments in evidence here. Allan feels that devices such as the iPhone could turn around the way we have traditionally conducted assessment in higher education.

No longer need students be locked away in a room scrawling in individual examination books; they could rather be out there in the real world, working with real world data, and collaboratively solving real world problems. And devices like the iPhone could allow us to track their performance and assess them appropriately

Allan was interviewed by Allan Carrington in one of the cavernous spaces of San Francisco’s Moscone Centre.

Background photo from Flickr.com: uploaded on September 7, 2008 by Pyrii

David Wallace has lots of good ideas, and has spent lots of time putting them into practice in the classroom, and collaborating with colleagues on refining and extending them. Yesterday we spoke to David about the recycling and repurposing of learning objects using Garage Band. Today Ian Green interviewed him again, this time about another of his favorite topics: using iChat AV and video streaming to enrich learning and teaching activity, and to connect the local school – or higher education or adult education or for that matter any learning community – classroom to global expertise and experience.

You can access all the material, and more, from David’s Macworld workshop on this subject through the
iChat in the Classroom exhibit, which is on the Apple Learning Interchange site.

The free, online video streaming service that David mentions in this episode is Ustream TV. He also refers to Wirecast.

Participants Comments
Listen to the commentary: Applying iChat in the Classroom

Andrew Raimest, an architect and educator from Saint Louis, Missouri, and Rae Peralta, an educator from St Marys College, Moraga, California, took part in David’s workshop. They spoke after the event with Allan Carrington, reflecting further on the potential of David’s ideas and on practical ideas for, and the challenges involved in, implementing them.

We’re sure that once you’ve listened to these episodes you’ll be itching to fire up your iChat, and there’s no doubt that David will be very happy to hear from you. But please also help fire up collaborative discussion of this topic by clicking the link below and going to our Comment Board to add your ideas.

The early days of developing digital learning objects were fraught with frustration. Every application had its own file format. Nothing would talk to anything else. And every new program would make the material produced by the old programs look dull and drab by comparison. So every new semester we’d be rewriting the material that we developed last semester. Even now, with radically improved file compatibility, many educators feel that in order to put something fresh and lively in front of their students they need to trash last year’s stuff and start all over again.

David Wallace, a Distinguished Apple Educator based in Webb City, Missouri, says that its time to put a stop to this rampant reinvention, and he showed us how in his IDG Macworld workshop, Garage Band 08 in Education: Remix your Media. David says that we should instead be repurposing and enhancing those learning objects, and he says that Apple’s Garage Band is the perfect application to do it. Garage Band, he says, is both powerful and intuitive; no other application – on any platform – quite matches it in functionality, and just about anyone can use it.

But this, importantly, is not just about saving curriculum development time for educators. As David explains in this interview with Ian Green, giving this ethos of reuse a pivotal place in your educational practice makes for greater engagement and greater empowerment for learner and educator alike. Read more about this interesting work on David’s GarageBand: Recycle, Reuse, Remix pages, which can be found within the Apple Learning Interchange site, a rich source for material on the educational uses of Garage Band and other Apple programs and systems.

Listen to this postscript: The editing obsession
Postscript: I ended the main interview with David with a comment about my amateurish audio editing skills, a throwaway remark that started another conversation about spontaneity, coherence and the dangers of getting obsessed with editing. We thought this conversation was worth sharing, so have also included the audio file here.

We all know that the iPod spearheaded a revolution in the way we think of and utllise personal entertainment. And some of us right now have a sense that the iPhone is leading a radical change in the way we go about our personal and professional business. Well, Joe Morelock, from the Canby School District in Oregon, and Kathy Shirley, from the Escondido Union School District in California, reckon that the iPod Touch has a similar revolutionary potential in the educational sector.

At Macworld today Joe and Kathy ran a workshop on that topic, entitled Tap into Something More: Using iPod Touch in the Classroom. Well, it wasn’t actually about educational revolutions per se. It was more of an opportunity for participants to get some hands-on experience of just what this device might be able to do for education, in the right pedagogical hands, that is, as Joe and Kathy explain in this interview with Ian Green.

Joe and Kathy are both Apple Distinguished Educators, and you can access a whole range of iPod Touch material that they have assembled, including guides, examples, resources etc., at Kathy’s iPoddess (yes, that’s ‘iPoddess’ as in ‘goddess’) and iRead sites.

Our team, led by Allan Carrington and Ian Green, will be cruising the conference, audio and video recorders in hand, interviewing presenters and participants involved in Macworld’s educators strands, and sometimes venturing into the wider exhibition areas to search out items of educational interest.

Our aim here is to do more than just go gaga over the latest piece of technology or some fancy new software. We want our conversationalists to think critically, to see things in their broader contexts, to tease out the educational implications, and to reflect on their own pedagogical practices.

AUC, being a university based consortium, has a primary interest in higher education, while CUE has a primary focus on the K-12 sector. So we are looking to cover a wide educational spectrum, and many of the episodes published here will also be available on the CUE Live site.

We hope you enjoy these episodes. But please don’t just play them passively. Make sure you also add your ideas and comments, which in an important new step for conference podcasting, you can now do either as audio or by good old fashioned text. This is easy to do – simply follow the links provided throughout these pages to find out how.

Listen. Contribute. Connect. Be part of the wisdom.